


The Allegory of the Cave

by milkandhoneycomb



Category: MapleStory
Genre: Gen, POV Outsider, also this is the first thing ive written in literal years so. enjoy i guess, i just have a lot of feelings about this boy!, kind of, like a shitton of headcanons, this is a very weird fic, unreliable narrator despite being third person omniscient
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:48:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24771892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milkandhoneycomb/pseuds/milkandhoneycomb
Summary: ...that which is only known by its shadow.Lives touched by a man untethered to reality.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	The Allegory of the Cave

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't played Shade's story, this will probably make no sense.

It begins like this: children find a stranger, and the stranger finds a strange land. 

He prods at the gaps in his own memory at the same time he prods at the gaps in the foxes’ bias. He grows familiar to them; first by days, then by weeks. Time, as it ever does, passes. 

The strange man becomes one of them — they can even forgive his bizarre appearance, because it is obvious that the Fox God has accepted him. He might not have been born a fox, but he is one now. 

He is named by them. He is shaped in their image. 

He is the village guard, who patrols the borders and shepherds the children from danger and hunts very, very well in spite of his innate human weakness. He is skilled, and adults point to him as an example. 

See here, says Patience, for here is a fox who knows how to be generous. See here, says Brook, for here is a fox who knows how to be brave. See here, says Timber, for here is a fox who knows how to be strong. 

He is strange and severe and stoic, but he is good and he is kind and he is a fox in every way that matters, for a long, long year. 

Nature, the foxes know, is unbalanced. Unfair. A faustian contract, fulfilled: a year gone in seconds. 

It ends like this: he steps foot through a portal, and a young girl finds that her guardian spirit has abandoned her. 

Henesys is an old town, populated by some even older still. 

Athena Pierce has met many people in her many years, but she does not recognize this face, this man speaking of heroes as though they lived but yesterday instead of centuries ago, speaking of them as equals. Friends, even. 

It’s the miracle of the hour, though. Heroes are waking up all over the world from their long, isolated slumbers. 

No surprise that one more has come to her doorstep, even one so mysterious. 

She regrets that she cannot tell him more, but wishes the stranger luck, and sends him after another ghost, revived. Maybe he will succeed in jogging Aran’s memory. 

Her mind 

lingers 

on the stranger

until it doesn’t. 

Athena doesn’t recognize the young man. He seems a bit distraught, however, and confused. She does what she can and bids him farewell.

She doesn’t recognize the young man. He seems to be a drifter, a new one at that, confident in his abilities but new to Henesys. Maybe new to Victoria Island as a whole — she spots his bladed knuckles, and vows to ask Kyrin about him. 

She doesn’t recognize the young man. He gives her supplies she doesn’t recall requesting, but is surprised to realize she needs. She must have put out a notice and forgotten about it. 

She doesn’t recognize the young man. He passes her window like a shadow against the dark night. But she senses no ill intent. 

She doesn’t recognize the young man. He sees her and turns on his heel, rudely. 

She doesn’t recognize the young man.

She doesn’t 

recognize

The world still needs heroes. Even when it forgets. Perhaps especially then. 

Deep in Ellinia, students at an academy find themselves safe. They were kidnapped, they recall, scattered and frightened and somehow saved… but by whom?

They recall the vaguest shadow of a tall human. This must be Cootie, they agree — to children, almost everyone is large. 

Obviously, the young man grew a backbone in defense of his beloved fairies. Impressive that he could defeat the Mole King all by himself, but humans are known for their tenacity, if nothing else. 

The final chapter in this story is quietly and unceremoniously closed. The children are safe. That’s all that matters. 

Edelstein had a string of highly successful supply runs recently. It’s the only way to explain the overabundance of food, arms, and gear they now find themselves sitting on. 

They don’t think too hard about the details, minds slipping from the past like oil on water — they don’t ask which members took on the missions, or when they were undertaken. 

Good on the recruits, taking the initiative to help their city. 

Spiruna sees a dozen terrible futures, each deadlier and more horrid than the last. Orbis sinking beneath the waters of the Ossyrian Sea, Ereve crashing into Victoria, the Temple of Time exploding into a million pieces. 

Nothing comes of them. No surprise, mutter the townspeople to each other — the old woman is a few pixies short of a park, after all. 

Her crystal ball, always so clear, is full of shadows. 

Aran turns to speak to someone mid-fight. But there is, of course, no person standing at her shoulder, no name coming to her lips. It was the hint of a shadow of a memory, something that must have been frozen out of her during her stint on the ice. 

Sometimes, retrograde amnesia is really damn frustrating. 

Déjà vu: already seen. He feels like a living ghost, a figure only identifiable by the shadows it casts. If nothing else, Moonbeam chose a fitting name. 

Sino hears a new prayer. It’s a new voice, and she turns her attention to it, intrigued. Not just a new voice but a human one, and one bound to spirits like her foxes — how strange! Why would a human be praying to her?

She listens curiously. He asks for his loved ones to stay safe, to remember him, and to succeed in their missions. He carries a lot of weight, for such a small creature. 

She decides to do what she can for him. If he’s spirit-bound and praying to the Fox God, perhaps he’s one of hers after all, just born wrong or gone astray somehow. He wouldn’t be the first fox with deformities, although he would be the first so severe. 

In a kingdom made of toys, a mechanic walks through the lower levels, whistling as she goes and spinning a wrench idly on her finger. The machines haven’t malfunctioned in ages. 

He still prays to a god that doesn’t remember him either.

In a kingdom made of sand, a group of bandits finally have more than enough to feed the desperate civilians they provided for so strenuously for so long. Queen Areda was found dead in her sleep months ago, the fairy finally succumbing to a heart attack, and King Abdullah has vanished. 

Slowly, the kingdom gets its feet back under itself. Crushing taxes and systemic abuses are something they are unable to forget and not keen to repeat. Their eyes are sharp for attempts to reinstate it. 

Scheherazade hugs her brother tightly — the ability to do so is one she will never again take for granted. The storyteller is on the verge of remembering something, after a survival so long dictated by the infallibility of her memory, but what is there to remember?

Phantom taps a card against his mouth in frustration. There’s a half-remembered, somehow familiar recipe he wants Marianne to make, but he hasn’t the faintest idea where he learned it in the first place. He knows it definitely isn’t an Ariant recipe, if nothing else. 

Eventually, he resolves himself to an unfulfilled craving. He’ll live. 

They don’t know him, can’t know him, but the man knows miracles. Things he shouldn’t know. Things he can’t know. 

Freud was only 5’4”, despite all the depictions to the contrary. 

Aran and Mercedes can’t cook to save their lives, but insisted on doing so frequently; they gave six different people food poisoning over the years. 

Phantom and Luminous’ eternal argument initially started with an inane bet in Ereve over who could get the most Tiguru feathers for their bedroll. 

Freud was a voracious reader of every genre, but had a secret hoard of romance novels he fervently denied the existence of. 

Mercedes fought with her mother for 200 years over whether she would be a good enough queen. On dark nights, she still wonders. 

Aran broke her arm once and it never fully healed; it still twinges when it snows and is prone to spasming when she uses a weapon that’s not the right weight. 

Phantom almost starved to death on the streets of Ariant when he was 11 years old. He counted the people that walked by him, but lost track after 20. 

The only people in the room when the Black Mage was defeated were Freud, Mercedes, Luminous, the demon general — and, apparently, himself. 

He says these things with an absent sort of confidence; his tone is familiar and deeply, deeply longing. Even the best spy in the world, even the most diligent historian, wouldn’t know half the things he does. 

They don’t trust him, they don’t even entirely believe him — but they accept him, if only to defeat the Black Mage once and for all. 

No one missed the aura of power around him, after all. He must be a strong fighter to have mastered so many strange spirits. 

Black Heaven is destroyed and he’s dying. 

If nothing else, it’s not the first time. Weak as he is, it’s almost peaceful — he doesn’t have the energy to fight it. Centuries ago, he gave his life for great purpose. What’s one more try?

His mind drifts like a drying river. He wonders if the curse will break when he dies, if he’ll be suddenly remembered, but somehow… he doubts it. More likely: he will die, and the Alliance will wonder at the stranger’s body in their midst. Perhaps his body will simply dissolve into light and they won’t have to worry about a funeral. He hopes they manage to celebrate their victory, afterwards.

And then, all at once, he’s alive again.

He stares at the little empress, shock and something like hope and horror building in him as the last seal stone dissolves into light. The soldiers around him cheer and holler, but he can’t help the dread rising in him.

You wasted it, he wants to tell her. You wasted the seal stone on me, when I’ve already died for it once. Let me rest, he wants to tell her, to tell the world. Please, let me rest.

The only thing he has, now and always, is silence. 

Accept it or don’t — the decision is made. 

Ereve is panicking. The Chief Knights are panicking. On Victoria Island, those who have received the news are panicking.

Shinsoo’s Tear has disappeared.

Lumiere feels almost homey with all of them stuck in it. Aran rolls her eyes as Mercedes gestures sharply, starting off on a familiar tangent — piping up quietly, Shade finishes her sentence. Word for word. 

He does so without looking up from sharpening his blades. 

Her eyes meet Luminous’. How well must he know them? How could they have forgotten?

There’s a city in the future, under Black Mage control, that shouldn’t exist. It is manipulated by shadows, drowning out what few sparks of light remain. The people are dying or brainwashed. Another shadow cannot help a people already so trapped in darkness. 

This is a form of positive destruction: killing the future by changing the present. Dueling shadows at the candle’s edge, fighting for existence. 

A lost dreamer, wandering, waiting, making a deal with the devil. Even she will forget him. 

For once, it may be an advantage. 

The question of how one goes about killing a god is often more pertinent than you might think. These many worlds, with their 365 dead gods and counting, are no stranger to deicide. The answer varies; some gods die in blood, some in darkness, some in silence. 

The answer, this time, is “carefully.”

It’s the final fight, a brutal remix of the first one. 

It takes everything the worlds have and then some. Transcendents, allied gods, dozens of heroes, and the full military might of multiple dimensions, united. 

Somehow, in some impossible twist of fate, it’s them against the Black Mage one last time. 

Shade’s out of place, here. He has always been the least of the heroes, always less than the others: the masters of dragons, the magic of Luminous, the cunning of Phantom, the speed of Mercedes, the strength of Aran. Even now, he is still the man he was centuries ago. Nameless, clanless, and alone. 

Nothing to die for… but nothing to live for, either. 

His friends — and he just can’t call them his former friends, even now— might like him enough, but it’s the work of a quick slip through dimensions to solve that problem. All affection is ephemeral. 

Even so, he fights. Harder than he ever has in his life. Dozens of spirits rip through the battlefield beside him, Aran at his back in a defensive formation as familiar as breathing. She doesn’t remember him, but it seems her body does. They weave around cards and arrows and blasts of fire so hot they singe their clothing

The fight is brutal. It seems to last an eternity, a thousand lifetimes — a battle with the literal world on the line, and them with their weak mortal bodies to win it. 

In a sheer numbers game, power versus power, there’s no chance of victory. But heroes, like humans, are known for their tenacity. 

They win. 

Barely. 

The Black Mage is not sealed away this time, not banished, not destroyed in any way that might possibly be reversible. He is ripped apart at the seams. His essence is dissolved back into the Erdas flow, his power scattered to the many dimensions themselves. They’re leaning on each other, bleeding and beaten, but still somehow, miraculously, numbering six. Evan is unconscious, being supported by a staggering Shade. Phantom and Mercedes are only upright because they’re attempting to fall through each other. Aran has a cut over her eye gushing so fiercely that she’s abandoned staunching it and is simply letting it bleed. Luminous is using his staff like a crutch for his broken leg. Still — they are alive. 

There is no trace of the Black Mage left, save their new scars and the blinding burst of transferred power that brings Luminous to his knees as soon as the fight has ended. 

But the fight has ended. 

And with the destruction of the Black Mage, the hundreds of curses he’s laid across the land dissolve too. A dark future collapses in on itself. Enemies lose power and crumple where they stand, having been supported only by borrowed strength. In other places, people wake, people die, people breathe. 

People remember. 

It starts to rain in Fox Point Village.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been: a very weird fic about Shade. He gives me lots of emotions and his ‘canon’ ending makes me sad so I ignored it.  
> This was unbeta’d and barely edited so things are probably super messed up, but the secret sauce is that it’s supposed to read super disjointedly so I can claim my fuckups are on purpose. Guess what’s actually happening in each section vs what people remember happening for bonus points. 
> 
> Shade eventually offhandedly mentions that he can't go back to Ariant if people remember him now because he murdered the queen in broad daylight and Phantom just stares at him


End file.
